Expert Says There is No Pernicious Anti-semitism in West Germany

Open and aggressive expressions of anti-Semitism do not exist in today’s West Germany but there are signs and indications of both old and new anti-Jewish feelings among the Germans, partly disguised as anti-Zionism, according to one of West Germany’s foremost leaders in the movement for improving relations between Christians and Jews in that country.

Addressing a group of Christian and Jewish religious and lay leaders at the American Jewish Committee headquarters here today. Dr. Dietrich Goldschmidt, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Education and Human Development in West Berlin, said that “the anti-Zionist position in West Germany was taken both by rightwing radicals and leftwing political activists supporting the Arab cause in general and the PLO in particular.”

For a long time, according to Goldschmidt, public opinion was very much in favor of the State of Israel. This, he noted, became most obvious at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The feeling of sympathy, he said, “was partly due to feelings of guilt because of the Holocaust. Germans were relieved that the Jews were no longer victims, but victors, and would not have to suffer further aggression and persecution.”

However, Goldschmidt asserted, Middle East politics has affected this feeling somewhat Yet, he stated, an ever-growing section of the public has become willing to examine the history of National Socialism, of World War 11, of the Jews, and of the Holocaust. Television, radio, and important national daily and weekly newspapers are constantly dealing with these topics, he said.

The TV series “Holocaust” was seen and discussed by an extremely large audience, Goldschmidt observed. “No doubt many supporters of today’s peace movement will point to the sufferings of Jews especially, but also of gypsies, Poles, Russians, and others when they protest against war preparations, which they feel could lead once again to genocide, supported by Germans,” he said.

Goldschmidt noted two tendencies that raise doubts about the extent to which the attitudes of the majority of the Germans were undergoing a genuine change.

“There is little understanding of the causes that brought Hitler to power,” he said, “and of the political developments and the interpretations of events from World War I until the beginning of 1933. Moreover, many of those who were driven out of their homelands in East Germany after the war, still feel that their suffering, including the destruction of cities like Dresden toward the end of the war, was similar to that of the Jews.”

Such people, he added, maintain there is no need to give special attention to the fate of the Jews or to deal with it more than with their own losses.

Commenting on a recent analysis of school curricula, textbooks, and teaching, Goldschmidt said it showed that serious attempts were being made to come to grips with the past, “but there is still a considerable lack of deeper understanding, sometimes a certain helplessness of the authors.” In teaching the history of Nazism, Goldschmidt said, facts like Hitler and his party’s rise to power, concentration camps, war, and Holocaust are described, but “Hitler and the Nazis remain strangers who descended upon Germany like a thunderstorm.”